Background:

The Green Infrastructure Task Force was created by the West Michigan Strategic Alliance with a bold and aggressive goal - to construct a 25 year vision for permanent protection of open space in our region. After more than 10 months of deliberations, the Task Force published the summary report titled "The West Michigan Green Infrastructure Strategy" in November 2003.

This report is a beginning, not an end. We believe we have successfully crafted a strategic framework for thinking about our regional green infrastructure - in essence an "open space" component to a West Michigan "regional mindset."

This work is far from finished, however. There is an enormous amount of work that remains to be done in refining this vision and integrating it with the day to day work of land use planning within over 100 local units of government. A regional vision is useful because it creates a framework and a context for a myriad of individual decisions. However, ultimately open space protection is a "parcel by parcel" challenge - the application of a host of open space protection tools to many individual parcels of land. From the continuous interplay between the broad vision and discrete actions, the reality of our green infrastructure future will emerge.